Hal Foster - Diego Rivera

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n02/hal-foster/at-moma

 
앞부분 디에고 리베라의 인생역정 등등은 생략.


Rivera used art history to underscore these desired shifts. His time spent in Paris and Italy is evident in pointed allusions to French and Italian painting. The woman who stands with her child between the police and the workers in The Uprising evokes The Intervention of the Sabine Women by David, and the lacerated peasant in Liberation of the Peon calls up the crucified Christ in Lamentation by Giotto. Here the sacrificial nature of history according to Rivera is both pagan and Christian, as is the mythical gloss that he gave it, and this is why his otherwise weird anachronisms of subject and technique – indigenous and modern, Mexican and European, fresco and steel, history painting and photographic effects – make sense. Across the Atlantic in these same years, Walter Benjamin argued that mass society and mass media worked to erode the auratic basis of traditional art. Rivera wanted it both ways – technological advance in society and iconic authority in art – and sometimes he forced the issue. For example, he had difficulty with his imaging of crowds, which often lump together the very sides he otherwise saw as opposed. Here the ex-Constructivists were perhaps right: photography and film are better suited to such compositions. Yet the force of his pictures is beyond doubt. My childhood home contained only one image I identified as art, a print of the Zapata mural; that a representation of an agrarian revolutionary could find its way into a middle-class house in Seattle in the 1960s attests to its powerful iconicity as much as to its popular circulation.

In the three New York panels Rivera turned from agrarian and revolutionary themes to industrial and capitalist ones. In Pneumatic Drilling (whose whereabouts are unknown) two giant labourers, composed as simple swirls of dynamic lines, bend over power drills, breaking ground for a Rockefeller Center on the rise, while in Electric Power three lone workers toil in three subterranean chambers of a steam plant on a nearby river. The concern of these two murals is the labouring body, often pictured anonymously from behind, with echoes of Realist predecessors such as Courbet (Pneumatic Drilling draws directly on his Stonebreakers), but with the scenes switched from bleak countryside to dynamic cityscape. With the sweep and speed of his execution, Rivera binds these working figures to his own painting body (he was famously rotund; Barr once described him, in his Waspy way, as ‘rather Rabelaisian’), yet this identification does not undo the alienation that Rivera also wanted to convey here. Unlike the natural sympathy of the rural panels, the men in these industrial scenes are connected to their tools and machines prosthetically but not spiritually.

The showstopper in the New York group is Frozen Assets, which presents a fictive cross-section of Manhattan in three layers. In the bottom rank, a caged bank vault is watched over by a clerk and a guard; at a desk inside a woman looks through her jewel box, while on a bench outside two young women wait with an older man (who resembles John D. Rockefeller Jr) to handle their own treasures. In the central rank, a vast hangar is filled with shrouded figures on the floor overseen by another guard (the near twin of the one below). Finally, in the top level, above an elevated platform where an endless line of anonymous workers shuffles to work in trains, the great metropolis rises; three cranes signal that the skyline is in active production. Frozen Assets is an inspired montage: Rivera based the vault on those he had toured in Wall Street and the hangar on the interior of the Municipal Pier on East 25th Street, while his skyline combines a few downtown banks with several new buildings in midtown, including the Chrysler, Empire State, McGraw-Hill, Daily News and Rockefeller Center (the last three of which were designed by Rockefeller favourite Raymond Hood). The allegory of this literal exposé is explicit: the building boom that gave us the great skyscraper city depended on the cheap labour represented by the subway drones and the sleeping bodies as much as on the stashed assets. In this not-so-divine comedy, the pier is a grey purgatory and the vault a brown hell, as much prison as bank (in this faecal cavern, Rivera almost suggests the anal sadism that Freud associated with money). Only the skyscrapers have any vitality, but their animation is fetishistic; indeed,Frozen Assets depicts a fetishisation of capital on a metropolitan scale, in which urban liveliness counts far more than the actual livelihood of working men and women; unlike the labouring bodies in the other murals, they are the real ‘frozen assets’ here.

How did Rivera get away with these pictures at MoMA? Again, his great patron was Abby Rockefeller – wife of John D. Jr, who was caricatured by Rivera, and mother of Nelson, who censored his Rockefeller Center mural. Her support mattered, of course, as did his popularity, but more important still was a public sphere that, in the depths of the Depression, was more capacious politically than anything Americans have experienced since. This was also a time when capitalism could still be grasped, readily if roughly, in terms of class iconography, and when capital was still material enough to be represented by a vault. Our situation today seems very different. If Frozen Assetswere updated, what form might it take? How to image our liquid assets, not to mention our vanished ones? And yet the coincidence of the present show and the Occupy Wall Street movement might point to new parallels. The MoMA exhibition opened in mid-November, just two days before Zuccotti Park was cleared by the police and four days before a major demonstration was staged throughout the city, with a nasty confrontation on the Brooklyn Bridge. In The Uprising the police beat down the protesters, and in Frozen Assets the guards watch over the rich and keep the poor in line. They still do. The clash on the bridge had brutal moments, and a common sign at OWS events is ‘Police Protect the 1%.’ OWS demonstrates that the politics of appearance by actual people in real space still counts; it suggests that public art might too.

마지막 부분에서 역설하는 할 포스터의 모습을 엿볼 수 있다.